A man named Calvin Thompson has been sentenced to prison after reportedly raping a fifteen-year-old girl. Sources tell us that the teen girl was the daughter of Calvin’s girlfriend, and that he had been repeatedly raping her teenage daughter for three months. During that time, Thompson was also sexually abusing his girlfriend’s other daughter.
Thompson pleaded not guilty in his court hearing, but according to the police report, the victim who was raped went into the police station to report the crime and police found his DNA on her, along with dark bruises around her neck.
Thompson was found guilty of statutory rape and battery of a minor and will serve twenty-five years in prison.
I scrolled down and there was a string of comments.
I know those girls, poor things. They’ll have to live with this forever.
This is about the Raine sisters, right? I knew them in school. I always thought something bad was going on in their house. Miley was always sad and skipping school and Melanie was always smiling and in everyone’s face. Always seemed like she was hiding something and pretending to be happy. Guess this was it.
How the hell didn’t the mother know this was happening to them under her own roof?!?
This guy can rot in hell. What a bastard.
Calvin Thompson. I knew that name. Melanie wrote it in her journals. Dylan was taunting her about it. Who the hell was this Calvin guy? He’d raped Melanie and molested Miley? So this was why she’d panicked and why Miley had been in and out of rehab. This man had assaulted them.
I thought about the words she wrote: You dirty fucking slut. You nasty bitch. She’d thought about them while with Felipe. Dylan said them when she’d confronted him about sleeping with Miley. Calvin must have said them to her when he’d raped her and she’d been living with that—had been tormented by those words for years. The only person who knew about the abuse, outside of Miley, was Dylan, and he’d thrown it in Melanie’s face like it meant nothing to him.
My mind was spinning now and my eyes hurt from the brightness of the screen, so I closed the lid of the laptop and stood a moment. After a few deep breaths, I sat down in the cushioned recliner and closed my eyes. This went way deeper than I thought. Way deeper. I don’t even know why I cared so much to find answers. Melanie was gone now and my marriage was crumbling to pieces over unanswered questions about her death. I could’ve just forgotten about this whole thing and let it go, like I did with everything else that stressed me out. But, in this particular case, I couldn’t. The truth was out there and I felt too close to it to give up now.
My eyes popped open again when an idea hit me. I went to the web browser on my phone to search for Calvin Thompson.
Several things showed up. Mostly news articles from North Carolina about his conviction over a decade ago. There were several Facebook pages listed and I clicked through each of them, because surely, one of the profiles had to be his. One of the links opened up a page where the profile image was a dog, and it said the person was from Raleigh, North Carolina. I scrolled the page, but there wasn’t much but reshared memes, Black Lives Matter articles, and some political pieces. I was scrolling so fast that I almost missed an image.
I went back up and shuddered a breath, my thumb hovering over the image. There he was. Calvin Thompson standing with the handle of a leash in his hand, a dog on the other end of it. The same dog in his profile photo. It hadn’t been twenty-five years yet. When the hell did he get out?
My thumb tapped against the side of my phone. Everything in me was telling me to just drop this, run away from this whole thing and focus on my life again, my crumbling marriage.
But I couldn’t.
I wouldn’t.
Because images of a bleeding Melanie still haunted me and I still had no idea where Miley was, but something in my gut told me this Calvin guy had an idea.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a purpose. I wanted to prove Roland was good—that he was a great husband who’d made a few mistakes—and I was going to do that. For once in my life, I was going to finish something I’d started and find out what really happened to Melanie.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
I was a fool.
It was two in the morning and I was looking up flights to Raleigh. I needed to speak to Calvin, and maybe that made me crazy considering his reputation and what he’d done to Melanie, but I had my pocketknife and pepper spray kit from Kell, and I wasn’t dumb enough to go alone.